Yes, exactly that. Tons of crime is committed using only in-person communication. Should we all have microphones in our homes? Do detective work, flip sources, follow the money.
The story about the woman recording her dates is getting extrapolated into too much. Her friends told her it made people uncomfortable and that she should stop. This is not a trend.
I think it is a huge mistake to believe that there is a “true” nature of the models. They are artificial, everything about them is a construct. This is like asking the true shape of the clay without the potter’s influence.
This reply helped me think more about what I want. I do my thinking when crafting the prompt, and I want to be able to do several passes. So the first draft I like to dictate and be able to live edit with my voice, but then I want to do a subsequent pass at the keyboard after the full prompt is written.
What I want is a 1940s style “taking dictation” where the words I say go through a step where the goal is to create the text Im imagining. So if I say “… very significant, actually just significant…” what Claude Code receives is “…significant…”.
I built this myself with whisper -> “secretary” prompt -> Claude Code, but having the first two steps be interactive is really what I would want.
I would argue it’s a matter of degree, not of kind. “Private equity” is a rhetorical device to convert “I run an unglamorous business” into “I’m the kind of person who gets the private tour”. All the status stuff can be bought.
Tangential a bit, but I grate at using “elite” as a synonym for “rich”. It adopts the framing favored by powerful people as if they have an inherent difference and aren’t just some people that society allows to have more resources. It promotes a false inevitability.
Aggravating the issue is the administration’s goal. They want an undereducated population and are using the more popular issue of student debt as a fig leaf. Note especially how it’s on the university to prove that each program justifies itself economically, increasing the administrative burden on colleges. If they really cared about limiting taxpayer burden, they’d exempt in-state tuition at state schools from this rule.
I actually think it’s even worse than the author suggests. Acronyms promote the illusion of understanding. You know the words the acronym stands for and it makes you feel a little bit like you know what it means, but you don’t. All names are meaningless words until we assign them a meaning, but acronyms trick you into thinking the name itself tells you something about what it is.
Sometimes I’m washing dishes and she walks into the room and doesn’t immediately know if there’s sound in my ears. It’d just be a nice little affordance to be able to proactively signal that.